Crypto-Squad: The Collection (Vol 1-3)

History of the Jews in Hungary

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The strong class divisions of Hungary were represented in the Jewish population. There was also religious division, with three denominations. Budapest, the South and West had a "Neolog" majority related to modern US conservative and Reform Judaism - the kipah and organ were both used in religious worship in the synagogues. Traditionalists "Status quo ante" were the smallest of the three, mainly in the North. The East and North of the country were overwhelmingly Orthodox more orthodox than "status quo ante". In broad terms, Jews whose ancestors had come from Moravia in the 18th century tended to become Neolog at the split in ; those whose ancestors were from Galicia identified as Orthodox.

The unmarked communities were under Hungarian rule during the Holocaust. The pronunciation of Hungarian names is consistent: In several towns, the number of Jews exceeded 1,, but their ratio in the local population was less than 5. These towns included Szabadka Subotica Nx with Jewish residents 3. Using data from the census, The following table shows the number of people who declared to be Israelite Jewish at the censuses inside the post-ww1 territory of Hungary.

Your religion was written on your birth certificate, your marriage license except in , during the short-lived Commune, see Hungarian Soviet Republic , even on your school grade reports. The net loss for Judaism due to official conversions was 26, people between and The 19 thousand Jews of Buda constituted about 9. Budapest and countryside combined, We can also see from this data that the Jewish communities suffered a 5. Class distinction was very significant in Hungary in general, and among the Jewish population in particular.

Rich bankers, factory owners, lower middle class artisans and poor factory workers did not mingle easily. In , there were 50, Jewish families living in Budapest. The following chart will illustrate the effect of the antisemitic " Numerus clausus " Law on the percentage of Jewish university students at two Budapest Universities.

Those who could afford went to study to other European countries like Austria, Germany, Italy and Czechoslovakia. In , of all males aged six and older, [39]. Seven of the thirteen Nobel prize winners born in Hungary are Jewish. This number dropped to More than 10, Jews died and thousands were wounded and disabled fighting for Hungary in World War I. But these sacrifices by patriotic Hungarian Jews may have been outweighed by the chaotic events following the war's end. With the defeat and dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire , Hungary would be forced by the Allies to adhere to the Treaty of Trianon , which ceded to neighboring nations fully two-thirds of Hungary's imperial territory and two thirds of its population, including a third of its ethnically Magyar citizens and many Jews.

These losses provoked deep anger and hostility in the remaining Hungarian population. But it was cut short in a spasm of communist revolution, which would have serious implications for the manner in which Hungarian Jews were viewed by their fellow-countrymen. In March , Communist and Social Democrat members of a coalition government ousted Karolyi; soon after 21 March , the Communists were to take power as their Social Democrat colleagues were willing neither to accept nor to refuse the Vix Note to cede a significant part of the Great Plains to Romania and the communists took control of Hungary's governing institutions.

While popular at first among Budapest's progressive elite and proletariat, the so-called Hungarian Soviet Republic fared poorly in almost all of its aims, particularly its efforts to regain territories occupied by Slovakia although achieving some transitional success here and Romania. All the less palatable excesses of Communist uprisings were in evidence during these months, particularly the formation of squads of brutal young men practicing what they called " revolutionary terror " to intimidate and suppress dissident views.

As in other countries where Communism was viewed as an immediate threat, the presence of ethnic Jews in positions of revolutionary leadership helped foster the notion of a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy. The sufferings endured during the brief revolution, and their exploitation by ultra-nationalist movements, helped generate stronger suspicions among non-Jewish Hungarians, and undergirded pre-existing anti-Semitic views.

Beginning in July , officers of Horthy's National Army engaged in a brutal string of counter-reprisals against Hungarian communists and their allies, real or imagined. Horthy's personal role in these reprisals is still subject of debate in his memoirs he refused to disavow the violence, saying that "only an iron broom" could have swept the country clean.

In the first few decades of the 20th century the Jews of Hungary numbered roughly 5 percent of the population. This minority had managed to achieve great commercial success, and Jews were disproportionately represented in the professions, relative to their numbers. In interwar Hungary, more than half and perhaps as much as 90 percent of Hungarian industry was owned or operated by a few closely related Jewish banking families. In , 60 percent of Hungarian doctors, 51 percent of lawyers, 39 percent of all privately employed engineers and chemists, 34 percent of editors and journalists, and 29 percent of musicians identified themselves as Jews by religion.

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Resentment of this Jewish trend of success was widespread: Admiral Horthy himself declared that he was "an anti-Semite", and remarked in a letter to one of his prime ministers, "I have considered it intolerable that here in Hungary everything, every factory, bank, large fortune, business, theater, press, commerce, etc. Unfortunately for Jews they had also become, by a quirk of history, the most visible minority remaining in Hungary besides ethnic Germans and Gypsies ; the other large "non-Hungarian" populations including Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, and Romanians, among others had been abruptly excised from the Hungarian population by the territorial losses at Trianon.

That - and the highly visible role of Jews in the economy, the media and the professions, as well as in the leadership of the Communist dictatorship - left Hungary's Jews as an ethnically separate group which could serve as a scapegoat for the nation's ills. In , Horthy's government passed a "Numerus Clausus", restricting the Jewish enrollment at universities to five percent or less, in order to reflect the Jewish population's percentage.

Anti-Jewish policies grew more repressive in the interwar period as Hungary's leaders, who remained committed to regaining territories lost in WW1, chose to align themselves albeit warily with the fascist governments of Germany and Italy — the international actors most likely to stand behind Hungary's claims. The first, promulgated on May 29, , restricted the number of Jews in each commercial enterprise, in the press, among physicians, engineers and lawyers to twenty percent.

The second anti-Jewish law May 5, , for the first time, defined Jews racially: Their employment in government at any level was forbidden, they could not be editors at newspapers, their numbers were restricted to six per cent among theater and movie actors, physicians, lawyers and engineers. Most of them lost their right to vote as well: At the next elections, less than a month after this new anti-Jewish legislation, only 38 privileged Jews could vote.

In the elections of May 28—29, Nazi and Arrow Cross Nyilas parties received one quarter of the votes and 52 out of seats. The "Third Jewish Law" August 8, prohibited intermarriage and penalized sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews. This means that inside the May borders of Hungary, there were , people or 5. From this number, , or 4.

The following is from another source, a statistical summary written in the beginning of and referring to the census data: The question about Jewish grandparents was added late to the questionnaires at the census of , when some of the sheets had already been printed.

In addition, a lot of Christians of Jewish ancestry did not answer this question truthfully.

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So while about 62, Christians admitted some Jewish ancestry including 38, in Budapest , their actual number was estimated at least , It is not clear whether the 10,—20, Jewish refugees from Poland and elsewhere were counted in the January census. They and anyone who could not prove legal residency since , about 20, people, were deported to southern Poland and either abandoned there or were handed over to the Germans between July 15 and August 12, In practice, the Hungarians deported many people whose families had lived in the area for generations.

In some cases, applications for residency permits were allowed to pile up without action by Hungarian officials until after the deportations had been carried out. The vast majority of those deported were massacred in Kameniec-Podolsk Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre at the end of August.

Many died as a result of harsh conditions on the Eastern Front and cruel treatment by their Hungarian sergeants and officers. Another 4, forced laborers died in the copper mine of Bor, Serbia. On March 18, , Adolf Hitler summoned Horthy to a conference in Austria, where he demanded greater acquiescence from the Hungarian state.

Horthy resisted, but his efforts were fruitless — while he attended the conference, German tanks rolled into Budapest. Their boss, Andor Jaross , was another committed anti-Semite. A few days later, Ruthenia, Northern Transylvania, and the border region with Croatia and Serbia were placed under military command. After the German invasion in March , the Hungarian Service did then broadcast warnings, but by then, it was too late. However, according to Professor Cesarani, although Jews who survived the deportations said that they had not been informed by their leaders, that no one had told them, there's plenty of evidence that the Hungarian Jews could have known.

According to Yehuda Bauer , when the deportations to Auschwitz began in May , the Zionist youth movements organized smuggling of Hungarian Jews into Romania. Around 4, Hungarian Jews were smuggled into Romania, including the Zionist youth movements that organized smuggling and those who paid individual smugglers on the border. The Romanians agreed to let those Jews in, despite heavy German pressure. The plan was to use 45 cattle cars per train, 4 trains a day, to deport 12, Jews to Auschwitz every day from the countryside, starting in mid-May; this was to be followed by the deportation of Jews of Budapest from about July Just before the deportations began, the Vrba-Wetzler Report reached the Allied officials.

Roosevelt on 26 June, and King Gustaf V of Sweden on 30 June, [61] subsequently pleaded with Horthy to use his influence to stop the deportations. Roosevelt specifically threatened military retaliation if the transports were not ceased. On 7 July, Horthy at last ordered the transports halted.

The first transports to Auschwitz began in early May , and continued, even as Soviet troops approached. The Hungarian government was solely in charge of the Jews' transportation up to the northern border. The first train went through Kassa on May On a typical day, there were three or four trains, with between 3, and 4, people on each train, for a total of approximately 12, Jews delivered to the extermination facilities each day. There were trains during these 33 days through June There were days when there were as many as six trains.

Between June 25 and 29, there were 10 trains, then an additional 18 trains on July 5—9. The th recorded train with the ,th victim heading to Auschwitz via Kassa was on July The unique Kastner train left for Bergen-Belsen with 1, people on June By July 9, , Jews had been deported, according to Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary Edmund Veesenmayer 's official German reports.

It has been estimated that one third of the murdered victims at Auschwitz were Hungarian. Photographs taken at Auschwitz were found after the war showing the arrival of Jews from Hungary at the camp. The devotion to the cause of the "final solution" of the Hungarian gendarmes surprised even Eichmann himself, who supervised the operation with only twenty officers and a staff of , which included drivers, cooks, etc.

Very few members of the Catholic or Protestant clergy raised their voices against sending the Jews to their death. Rome was liberated on June 4, D-day landing in Normandy was on June 6. Roosevelt urged the halt to the deportations. Admiral Horthy ordered the suspension of all deportations on July 6. Nonetheless, another 45, Jews were deported from the Trans-Danubian region and the outskirts of Budapest to Auschwitz after this day. After the failed attempt on Hitler's life, the Germans backed off from pressing Horthy's regime to continue further, large-scale deportations, although some smaller groups continued to be deported by train.

In late August, Horthy refused Eichmann's request to restart the deportations. Himmler ordered Eichmann to leave Budapest [76]. According to Winston Churchill , in a letter to his Foreign Secretary dated July 11, , "There is no doubt that this persecution of Jews in Hungary and their expulsion from enemy territory is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world Switzerland was allowed to issue 7, Schutzpasses, Sweden 4,, and the Vatican, Portugal and Spain 3, combined.

Nyilas raids and mass executions occurred in both ghettos regularly. In addition, in the two months between November and February , the Nyilas shot 10,—15, Jews on the banks of the Danube.

Soviet troops liberated the big Budapest ghetto on January 18, On the Buda side of the town, the encircled Nyilas continued their murders until the Soviets took Buda on February Rudolf Kastner deserves special attention because of his enduring negotiations with Eichmann and Becher to prevent deportations to Auschwitz, succeeding only minimally by sending Jews to still horrific labor battalions in Austria and ultimately saving 1, Jews in Kastner's train.

An estimated , Jewish people were liberated in Budapest 25, in the small, "international" ghetto, 69, in the big ghetto and 25, hiding with false papers and 20, forced laborers in the countryside. Almost all of the surviving deportees returned between May and December , at least to check out the fate of their families. Their number was , It is estimated that from an original population of , people considered Jewish inside the borders of —, about , survived. This gives a According to another calculation, Hungary's Jewish population at the time of the German invasion was ,, of which , survived.

Here are two very different estimates for the number of survivors of people considered Jewish. The numbers are in thousands. The estimate of , people considered Jewish is not an exaggeration for From Hungary to the US, the total number of emigrants was 30, between and and 7, between and Rudolf Israel Kastner [91] — was a Jewish-Hungarian journalist and lawyer who became known for his actions during the Holocaust in Hungary.

Between May and July , Hungary's Jews were being deported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau at the rate of 12, people a day — for "resettlement," as the Nazis said. Kastner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann and Kurt Becher , both senior SS officers, to allow 1, of them to leave instead for Switzerland on what became known as the Kastner train , in exchange for money, gold, and diamonds. He later emigrated to Israel and was the subject of a famous libel casel regarding claims by Malchiel Gruenwald that Kastner had collaborated with the Nazi regime.

Kastner allegedly knew deported Jews were being gassed at Auschwitz as early as April from the Vrba—Wetzler report but did little to warn the wider community. Through his inaction he helped the SS avoid the spread of panic, which would have slowed down the transports.

The judge ruled in Gruenwald's favor, accusing Kastner of having "sold his soul to the devil. Most of the decision was subsequently reversed by the Israeli Supreme Court in , although a dissenting opinion agreed with the original judgement that Kastner had acted "knowingly and in bad faith, fulfilled the wishes Joel Brand April 25, — July 13, was a Hungarian Jew known for his role during the Holocaust in trying to save the Hungarian-Jewish community from deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Described by historian Yehuda Bauer as a brave adventurer who felt at home in underground conspiracies and card-playing circles, Brand teamed up with fellow Zionists in Budapest to form the Aid and Rescue Committee , a group that helped Jewish refugees in Nazi-occupied Europe escape to the relative safety of Hungary, before the Germans invaded that country too in March With German travel documents, Brand traveled to Turkey and to Palestine to transmit this offer to officials of the Jewish Agency and the British government.

According to his testimony in the Jerusalem trial of Eichmann in , he met with scepticism and disbelief on the part of his interlocutors. He was arrested and jailed by the British authorities in Cairo. The British government publicly denounced the German offer in the press. Brand was very bitter that his pleas to save Hungary's Jews were unanswered. After seizure of the train by American forces , almost none of the valuables were returned to Hungary or their rightful owners or their surviving family members.

Using his staff to prepare Protective Passports under the authority of the Swedish Legation, Raoul Wallenberg saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews, and according to some accounts a hundred thousand - the later by preventing the murder of 70, residents of the Ghetto.

Summary Bibliography: Eric S. Brown

At one point, he appeared personally at the railway station, insisting that many Jews on the train be removed, and presenting the Arrow Cross guards with the Protective Passports for many on the train. Carl Lutz , of the Swiss Legation, also saved many people in a similar manner. In —53 there were preparations in Budapest for a Moscow directed antisemitic show trial, claiming that Wallenberg was murdered by Hungary's Jewish leaders in The Jewish leaders were arrested and severely tortured, along with two non-Jews who helped Wallenberg rescue Jews: The victims of the show trial were saved only by Stalin's death on 5 March Yet they never fully recovered from the torture, and one of the two died shortly after his release.

Budapest named Wallenberg as an honorary citizen in Several sites honor him, including Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park, which commemorates those who saved many of the city's Jews from deportation to extermination camps, and the building that housed the Swedish Embassy in The difficult economic situation coupled with the lingering anti-Semitic attitude of the population prompted a wave of migration.

Between and , 40,—50, Jews left Hungary for Israel 30,—35, and Western countries 15,—20, People of Jewish origin dominated the post-war Communist regime until —53 when many were removed in a series of purges. They even sometimes expressed anti-Semitic attitudes themselves. Indeed, under Communist rule from to , Zionism was outlawed and Jewish observance was curtailed.

Moreover, members of the upper class, Jews and Christians alike, were expelled from the cities to the provinces for 6—12 months in the early s. Jews were on both sides of the uprising. Diplomatic relations with Israel were severed in , but it was not followed by antisemitic campaigns as in Poland or the Soviet Union.

In April , the Hungarian parliament passed a Jewish compensation act that returns property stolen from Jewish victims during the Nazi and Communist eras.

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Under this law, property and monetary payment were given back to the Jewish public heritage foundation and to Jewish victims of the Holocaust. To add insult to injury, an indeterminate number of the Christian victims who were compensated for properties nationalized by the Communist regime had, in fact, "legally" or fraudulently acquired them from Jews during the Nazi era. The reparation offer was based on Law XXIX of so it was in fact passed under Gyula Horn 's socialist-free democrat government — Between and economic situation deteriorated.

In extreme elements have established a paramilitary organization "Hungarian Guard" with uniforms reminiscent to those of Nyilas Party in the s and during WW2. However, this organisation was disbanded in by a court order. At the election, the openly antisemitic " Jobbik " party still received The economy has subsequently recovered under the centre-right Fidesz government - which maintains a friendly relationship with Israel's Likud Party - and Jobbik rescinded its antisemitic stance, entering into an election alliance with Hungary's leftist and Liberal parties.

The Hungary census recorded 12, people declared Jewish religion. T in the census of Jewish education is well organised: Hungary is also home to the Budapest University of Jewish Studies. There is a flourishing Jewish cultural life in Budapest, with regular festivals, concerts, literature events, conferences, etc. For an upcoming event see: Jewish Summer Festival in Budapest. Since the fall of Communism in , there has been a modest spiritual revival of Jewish observance. The Hungarian government supports this spiritual revival, among others by funding the renovation of synagogues, the construction of a Jewish hospital and Jewish memorial centres, and subsidising Jewish schools, social institutions and cultural events.

The Jewish denominations received money from 7, taxpayers 0. The reform communities were not allowed to get money from the taxes, since they became not officially recognized in In December , the number of "recognized" denominations was increased to Jews born after the Holocaust, i.

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